Thursday, 1 November 2012

...Eyes should be washed, we should see things in another way.
...Words should be washed.
...Word itself should be the wind, word itself should be the rain....-- Sohrab Sepehri: from The Footsteps of Water, 1965

Rain shafts riddling the night the long homeward Path of sodden leaves and slush, traffic splashing Up a spume of dirty water on Shattuck Labouring .............through the deafening downpour Out of a blurred, soggy past, becoming who?Reflected on cold glass, blurring, haltingAt the Circle, world turning ..................................round a roundabout.Miwoks once ground acorns in holes in these rocksTo feed themselves, ........................ Captain UselessNon-native returning In the blue sluicing mirror of the headlights

To prove my own non-native status (as well as my ignorance, once again), I ought to admit that the Miwok tribe ("Miwok" meaning "the people") are an over-the-hill (that is, from here) gang. The local indigenes in this precise spot from which I now attempt to speak were the Ohlone people ("Ohlone" is a Miwok word meaning "western people"). These people ground acorns (to make a kind of mash, basic foodstuff) in declivities in a big rock just up the hill here. It is called, in a fairly obvious yet still accurate designation, Indian Rock. The hardy dame of the manor, whose intrepid pioneering boggles the mind of this stodgy old reporter, in fact happens to be dodging the raindrops up there at this moment.

Abbas Kiarostami, of course, is not a native American. He is of that tribe which one of our candidates for Big Chief is being egged on by his moneybags to bomb back into the Stone Age (the one with no acorns or oaks, that is).

WB's comment reminds me that the names of the photographer and of the author of the lines in the epigraph here may not be familiar to everyone.

Abbas Kiarostami, a maker of poetic images to stop the heart. His films should be known to everyone.

Sohrab Sepehri, a world poet -- little known in this country, where so much of the world is so little known.

One of Kiarostami's earliest films, and a classic for the ages, takes the title of a Sepehri poem, and offers a beautiful cinematic variation on the theme of that poem.

Here you will see Sepehri's poem rendered into English, and stills from the Kiarostami film. In the attendant comments there is a video link that will enable those interested to be opened up to those worlds.